Sunday, July 10, 2016

The internet is not your friend

Frederik Pohl and CM Kornbluth’s classic novel The Space Merchants posited a future
where it was impossible to escape advertising, with marketing messages beamed
directly onto our retinas. But they didn’t foresee how big data could be used,
or misused, in the real world. Or how lethal the whole system could become.

Your mobile phone carries a great deal of information about
you, including your browsing and internet purchasing history which, if accessed
by marketers, can be used to build up a profile of the type of person you are:
male, female, new parent, teenager, Ford driver, etc.

Each phone has a unique ID that marketers can use to gather
this information. As well as this ID, if you’ve ever permitted an app to know
your location then the marketers can also see where you are at any particular
time and send ads that will show up while you browse Facebook, for example when
you’re enjoying a drink at a café or bar, to tell you a shop is nearby that
sells stuff you are interested in. This is called geo-fencing, where your
phone’s location triggers an ad to be sent your way. It all sounds slightly
creepy.

But it became even creepier when an anti-abortion group in
America contracted a marketer to geo-fence abortion clinics. As a result, phone
owners who had been profiled as female and young, based on their browsing
history, and who were present (with their phone) at the clinics were sent
anti-abortion/ pro-choice adverts. This is not an invasion of privacy because
the marketer didn’t know who they were, but browsing histories create uncannily
accurate virtual profiles.

Of course this is a fairly unsubtle use of what could be an
infinitely more delicate and insidious tool. In Horizon, governments waged ‘information wars’ to sway public
opinion and leave countries ripe for takeover without a shot being fired.
Misinformation is already becoming a problem on the internet and it is only
going to get worse.

This article originally appeared in the 'Launch Pad' section
of Beyond, my free newsletter for lovers of science and science fiction. Sign
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SF quotes

"the Culture had placed its bets—long before the Idiran war had been envisaged—on the machine rather than the human brain. This was because the Culture saw itself as being a self-consciously rational society; and machines, even sentient ones, were more capable of achieving this desired state as well as more efficient at using it once they had. That was good enough for the Culture."— Iain M. Banks